Tom Blumer, the spectacularly clueless NewsBusters blogger, is weirdly obsessed with the Associated Press — to the point that he’s actually mad when the AP reports the truth. Blumer goes off on the AP again in a March 28 post:
Media outlets around the world are reporting that Faycal Cheffou has been arrested for his alleged involvement with last week’s terrorist attacks in Belgium.
[…]
Media outlets around the world are reporting that Faycal Cheffou was a journalist — except for the Associated Press.
There are two entries at the AP’s “Big Story” site which contain references to Cheffou. A search at the AP’s main national site, where stories originally posted often disappear after they are “updated” for future developments, returned no stories on Cheffou.Why won’t AP describe Faycal Cheffou as others have? Because he didn’t have a union card? Someone will have to ask them.
AP’s position on this is far more than an academic matter. Its writeups clearly drive the presentation of the news on the Big 3 networks’ morning shows, and virtually ensures that Cheffou, if he is mentioned at all, will not be tagged as a journalist. If he really was, and there seems to be little reason to believe that he wasn’t, that’s a pertinent fact viewing audiences should know, and won’t.
Missing from Blumer’s article: any evidence that Cheffou is, in fact, a journalist. And there appears to be a good reason the AP didn’t report this information: because it doesn’t appear to be true.
Blumer does mention a video Cheffou posted on YouTube two years ago as apparent backup for his “journalist” claim. But as the UK Independent reports, that video is the only apparent proof of Cheffou being a “journalist,” and nobody is calling him that except Cheffou himself.
Blumer notes an AFP article that “refers to Cheffou working, presumably as a news person, at a radio station back in 2008.” But Blumer is merely speculating; the article does not state what he did at the radio station and, like the Independent, notes that the source of Cheffou being a “journalist” is Cheffou himself.
So it seems that the AP is being quite prudent in not labeling Cheffou as something for which there is no proof. Blumer might want to take a lesson from that.